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Obligatory read..., The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956 https://www.multivax.com/last_...

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. He said it was his favorite story he had ever written.

Eventually entropy will destroy the universe. Even if you've survived normal human mortality, the end of the Earth, and the end of the Sun (etc, etc, etc)... ultimately absolutely nothing you've ever achieved will have any significance whatsoever.

Can entropy be reversed?

I have worked with organizations that used similarly old stuff and would buy stacks of replacements. The problem was that nearly all the replacements were failing in the same way before any use.

"You're weak on logic, that's the trouble with you. You're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one."

You're thinking of "The Last Question"
http://www.multivax.com/last_q...

http://www.multivax.com/last_q...

http://www.multivax.com/last_q... There has never been a better time to read that story.

the last question

I prefer the last answer

"He threw the switch connecting all the galaxies computing power, and asked the question: " Is there a god""
From the speaker he heard the reply "Now there is"

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956 http://www.multivax.com/last_q...

...with the help of MultiVAX intelligence will... (Won't spoil it for those who haven't read it yet.)

yet no one seems to have mentioned Asimov's "last question"... WTF?

http://www.multivax.com/last_q...

You need to ask the multivax a question about entropy.

http://www.multivax.com/last_q...

Don't care how. Why? Because I have no desire to extend my life to some arbitrary point in the far future where I might be alive, but only trivially functional compared to now. Even if you could bring me back as a young person, I would have no desire.

Continuing to exist is a parlor trick. Ceasing to exist is a trick not permitted to us.

As for the state of things while we (sentient life) are here, I think that evolution generally handles things like long-term memory pretty well, without the weight of previous centuries to get us stuck in the mud. Death and life are transitory fluctuations.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956
From http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time
when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five
dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:
Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As
well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing
face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion
of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where
any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.
Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could
adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough -- so Adell and Lupov
attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could.
They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were
issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share In the glory
that was Multivac's.
For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled
man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth's poor resources could
not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its
coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.
But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally,
and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.
The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide
scale. All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch
that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half
the distance of the Moon. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower.
Seven days had not sufficed to dim the glory of it and Adell and Lupov finally managed
to escape from the public function, and to meet in quiet where no one would think of
looking for them, in the deserted underground chambers, where portions of the mighty
buried body of Multivac showed. Unattended, idling, sorting data with contented lazy
clickings, Multivac, too, had earned its vacation and the boys appreciated that. They had
no intention, originally, of disturbing it.
They had brought a bottle with them, and their only concern at the moment was to relax
in the company of each other and the bottle.
"It's amazing when you think of it," said Adell. His broad face had lines of weariness in it,
and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily
about. "All the energy we can possibly ever use for free. Enough energy, if we wanted to
draw on it, to melt all Earth into a big drop of impure liquid iron, and still never miss the
energy so used. All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever."
Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be
contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice
and glassware. "Not forever," he said.
"Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert."
"That's not forever."
"All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?"
Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some
was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. "Twenty billion years isn't forever."
"Will, it will last our time, won't it?"
"So would the coal and uranium." "All right, but now we can hook up each individual spaceship to the Solar Station, and it
can go to Pluto and back a million times without ever worrying about

My appologies. Slashdot links keep adding trailing slash. Here is the corrected link:

The Last Question

The story is called "The Last Question" and it is in my personal opinion the greatest science fiction short story ever written. I do not believe it is suited to be called "Most Depressing" because it has a really up-lifting ending. I would recomend you read the last part: The whole short story is available free here:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html/

Though perhaps some may see the re-birth to still be a downer, it is still much more cheerful than other stories mentioned in this Ask Slashdot.

Maybe some day Google will tell us how to reverse entropy

What do you think happened when the last sentient species figured this out, about.. oh, 13.7 billion years ago..

Insufficient data for meaningful answer

And then AC said "Now let there be light!"

(No not Anonymous Coward AC, this AC)

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

One of the computers in this story was composed of microscopic vacuum tubes. Will it be possible to create a massive analogue computer like that instead of using digital chips?

Asimov's The Last Question, bitches!

It was an old system. Older than time itself. You may remember tales of it, from a universe that long since expired. Its name was AC

One of my favorite stories, for example, is Isaac Asimov's the Last Question. It doesn't get into details about how the computer works, what variables it's considering, or even how humanity is evolving. It merely postulates that, with each generation, technology becomes more accessible and more integrated into our lives. In an ironic twist, it suggests that we begin to become a part of technology to a point where our minds fuse with AI and become a single consciousness.

The Last Question is my favorite short story. You can read it here. You won't regret it.

And that's how thing[s] will end and remain ended.

That's not true, actually. You see, beyond the accelerating universe, by the time of the end of which you speak, we will have built ... "God", for lack of a better word. B...

The last question

This discussion would be incomplete without a mention of Asimov's short story The Last Question. (Not that it should be necessary to mention, much less link, but this is not the /. it used to be.)

Well, let's try The Last Question then.

Isaac Asimov saw the day coming when man would not be smart enough to design the next version of a computer. The computer would have to design its own successor, each supremely more powerful and yet smaller than the last. Extrapolating this trend over many iterations, the computer becomes uniquely supreme in power and omniscience. But we have a different word for that.

A classic only a few pages long and worth a read, The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov.

don't imagine that we are the result of someone's efforts in those same endeavour; i.e. maybe god did create (organise) the world.

They might imagine it, many sci-fi authors have written creation-type stories for example. They just can't prove it and so they leave it in the realm of fiction.

He also wrote a short story with a similar idea in 1956. You can read it online.

Reminds me of the Last Question by Issac Asimov - The Last Question

Great short story.. though I bet most people here have already read it. :)

I forgot the link.

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

The Last Question

You ask the last question 40 years early.

It's been linked before on Slashdot and it's about entropy:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

The Last Question is a pretty cool story.

best short story ever.

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

That is like saying that solar power isn't a renewable resource because eventually the Sun will die in 5+ billion years.

Yes, but I'm sure the sun can be revived, eventually.

never read isaac asimov's last question, i take it?

Never read The Last Question, I take it?

Read:

"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Just ask your PC how to reverse entropy, and the rest will take care of itself.

You would probably enjoy this, if you haven't read it already. http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

T

Coincidentally, the Ask Slashdot regarding SciFi works for students lead me to Isaac Asimov's cool short story "The Last Question" (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html which has an interesting perspective on this...

Read some short stories by Asimov or Le Guin or Gaiman...

One of the nice things about science fiction/speculative fiction, in my opinion, is that it works wonderfully well in the short story format. Even something as short as Asimov's 'The Last Question' provides an enormous wealth of literary, historical and scientific topics to discuss.

Furthermore, you're quite right that too much $Fav_Author is bad, but I think that you would agree that some works are more worthy of in-class study than others!

Short stories are good!

The Last Question
The Babyeating Aliens
They're made out of Meat

For some short(er) novels try:

Slaughterhouse Five and/or The Sirens of Titan and/or Cat's Cradle
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz(for a well known fairy tale)
Then you can follow it up with the longer Wicked or The Ugly Stepsister or some other modern retelling so you can discuss the clash of a mundane world with a fantasy world.

For longer books I would recommend:
Ender's Game
Stranger in a Strange Land
and maybe The Dragon Never Sleeps

Nerds belong in a sci-fi/fantasy lit class. but on a more serious note, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov should definitely be on the list.

Zim: Computer, give me all the information you have on the FBI.
Computer: The FBI is a government law enforcement agency.
Zim: Continue.
Computer: Insufficient data.

Ahh... so THAT's how you decrease entropy.